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One Word: Consistency

nancy 7 Comments

This year, I have decided to focus both my professional and personal life on consistency. Not the kind in which everything is the same with no interesting variations (think factory-produced rubber ducks on an assembly line), but the kind of consistency that is a habit. In a good way, not in the, “I should hang up my coat but the closet is 20 feet away so I’ll just leave it on the couch like I always do,” kind of way.

rubber ducks “Rubber duckies So many ducks” by gaetanlee – http://www.flickr.com/photos/gaetanlee/298160434/. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Like any educator, I am always working on several different things at once. It’s not really a problem; I love multi-tasking. It keeps my interest and creativity high when I am consistently forced to change my focus. The problem is that I have a less-than-stellar record about returning to what I was working on before that new thing came toddling down the lane. I always complete everything I have to, but I would like to be more consistent, finishing what I start, making what I create match my vision of what it should be, and doing regularly those tasks that should be done regularly.

For example, part of my job includes developing resources to support teachers in my district. I created a website on book trailers and finished all the sections needed to do the professional development I was facilitating. The website is good, but I had other materials on additional tools and have not yet added those sections (note to self: work on book trailer site next week). Similarly, I was planning on writing more frequently on this blog and even posted about it last May. I haven’t done that, but I am going to try again. I am joining the #youredustory blogging challenge because I hope that the support of this community of bloggers will help me improve my practice by encouraging me to reflect better and more deeply on what I do and who I am as a teacher.

And just in case you were wondering, in my personal life, the two main areas in which I am struggling to be more consistent are exercising and filing paperwork. Suggestions for ways to address any of these issues are welcomed.

Missed the Hour of Code? It’s not too late!

nancy

My students had a great time coding up a storm over the last two weeks. I know the Hour of Code was Dec. 8-14, but I only see the kids every other week, so our Hour of Code was Dec. 8-19. If you didn’t do any coding with your students because you didn’t know where or how to start, here is a Thinglink resource for you to use. I encourage you to get started and give it a try. Anyone can code!


Base image by Geralt via Pixabay.com. Public domain.

Do You Tackk?

nancy 2 Comments

Recently, I discovered Tackk, a new way to post and share content online. It allows you to create an attractive one-page design that can incorporate content from over 250 online sources, including ThingLink (as in my example below), YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, SlideShare, Google Maps, Prezi, and more. You do not need to create an account, but if you don’t, your Tackk will be deleted after a week.

(Scroll down to see the full Tackk.)

I have found Tackk to be very easy to use with many options to customize your work so you can get your Tackk to look just the way you want it. You can also turn the ability to comment on or off. One feature I especially like is that Tackk has partnered with 500px. If you need to add a photo to your Tackk, you can search 500px and the photo credit will be automatically added to your Tackk.

Applications for education: You could use Tackk to present content, give assignments (as in my example), but even better, you could have students create their own Tackks as evidence of learning. For example, students could each create ThingLink to examine various aspects of a problem and then combine them into one Tackk to provide an overview of the issue. You can create Tackkboards (collections of Tackks) for your students to post their content.

Haiku Deck slide

Save Haiku Deck slides to your iPad

nancy

After attending a presentation on iOS creation apps I did this weekend, a participant asked me about the best way to save Haiku Deck slides to her iPad so she could use them as the basis for Thinglink and Pic Collage projects. If you are not familiar with Haiku Deck, it is a free iPad app that allows the user to create beautiful presentations using Creative Commons licensed images (and they are gorgeous). The themes are simple and elegant and the app is easy enough for primary students to learn in just a few minutes.

The presentations can be exported directly from the app as a PDF or PowerPoint, but saving the slides as images requires a few extra taps and button pushes. It turns out that the best way to save your work as images is by doing screenshots of each slide as you play your presentation.

To do it, create your Haiku Deck. Click the Play button.

Haiku Deck slide

As you proceed through your presentation, take a screenshot of each slide by pressing the Home and Sleep/Wake (Power) buttons at the same time. You will know you are successful if you see the screen flash white and you hear the camera shutter sound. The resulting screenshots will be saved to your iPad and can be accessed and used just like any other photo.

add background

No more disappearing Google Site header images

nancy

upload header image

I love Google Sites. They are easy to use and infinitely flexible. My district recently adopted Google Apps for Education and I have created and/or worked on more of them than I can count.  I love how adding a background image to the header can make even sites using the same template look very different. Usually, everything works as it should.

Strangely, in the past two weeks, I ran across the same problem on three different Google sites. We had beautiful header images for them, but every time we changed the title font or made any of a number of other changes to the site colors, themes, and fonts, the header image disappeared upon saving and we had to reupload it. Again. And again. And again.

It turns out that the reason is that the filename for each of those images had spaces in it. Renaming them and then reuploading solved the issue. So, if you find your header image disappearing, try making the spaces in the filename disappear instead.

squirrel icon selected

Custom Icons for Mac

nancy

Custom icon
I use custom icons on our school computers instead of the standard Mac icons. This helps students find the link or shortcut I want them to access more quickly and easily, and it only takes a few minutes to do.

To begin, download the image that you want to use for your custom icon. I like to search for what I want on iconarchive.com because they have thousands of free, licensed images. You can use either a .jpg or a .png format, and it should be at least 48 x 48 pixels in size.

Double click the image you downloaded. It will open in Preview. Choose Edit > Select All (or use the keyboard shortcut Command + a). You will see the outline to show it has been selected.

selected squirrel

 

Copy the image (Edit > Copy or Command + c).

On your desktop, click the icon whose look you want to change. Make sure you click it once to select it, not twice to open it. Then go to File > Get info (Command + i) and click the icon preview at the top.
icon preview location

The blue outline that appears shows you that the icon image has been selected.

blue outline

Paste the image you just copied in its place (Edit > Paste or Command + v). If you like, you can change the name appearing under the icon as well by editing the Name & Extension section.

Finished Get Info window

Close the window and you are done!

Coffee Nancy logo

New website design

nancy

In keeping with the philosophy of sharing something small every day, I have been trying to post more frequently on this website, and I realized that the way it was set up no longer satisfied my needs. I created CoffeeNancy.com to allow people to get to know me and to share what resources I could with those who would have them. In reflecting on the way the site was set up, I decided that it was not bad, but it could be much better.

Enter this new redesign. I have put the blog front and center so that you can get to know me more from what I post than simply from reading my bio. The links on the sidebar should make it easier to find things you are looking for. I have also added a Subscribe button in case you want to be notified of new posts via email. The one thing I wasn’t sure about was whether people prefer to see more posts on a page with a “read more” link or if they would rather see full-length posts. Please let me know what you think.

I’d also love to hear your thoughts on this new design. Please share in the comments or tweet at me.

train

Move Documents from One Google Account to Another

nancy

Our district is implementing Google Apps for Education, and today I trained several teachers on using Drive. Some of the teachers had already been using personal Google accounts to create documents and collaborate with their teams, and they wanted to know how to move those files from the personal Google accounts to their new school accounts.

You can’t simply move the documents or files, but you can transfer the ownership of most files from account to the other. Simply follow these steps:

  1. Log into your personal Google account at drive.google.com.
  2. Check the box next to the item you want to add to your new account.
  3. Click the Share icon OR go to the More menu and select “Share…” sharing
  4. Add the email address of the new account in the field for “Invite people,” then click Share & save. (If you have already shared the document with your new account, you can skip this step.)
  5. You should now see the new account listed in the shared settings. Click the drop-down menu to the right of the name and choose “Is owner.”
    Change owner
  6. Save your changes. Your new account is now the owner of the document, and the original account is an editor.
  7. (Optional) If you want to remove the document completely from the original account, log into your new account, go to the sharing settings for the document, and stop sharing with your original account.

If you have a regular Gmail account, be aware that you can’t change the ownership of some files, such as images and PDFs. To move these files, follow these steps:

  1. Proceed as above and follow steps 1-4 to share the item with the new account.
  2. Log into the new account and located the item in the “Shared with Me” section.
  3. Click the box next to it and choose File > Make a copy.
  4. Choose the name you want for the copy.

This will create a copy of the item in your new account. If you want, you can go back to your original account and delete the item there. Remember that if you make a copy of a file, it will not be shared with the same people as the original. If there are files whose ownership cannot be transferred, but you want to work with them in a different account from the one where they were originally uploaded, it may be easier just to share them with the new account and leave the original file where it was.

Train image: public domain